Miss Johnson's is the humanistic, not the satirical, eye…. [In "The Honours Board"] she gives us telling portraits of the people in and around [a] small, not very distinguished, upper-middle-class school (all of the characters begin by saying that class distinctions don't matter in Britain any more, and end by suspecting that they do). Central are Cyril and Grace Annick, the aging headmaster and his wife, devoted equally to the school and to each other, and the much longed-for and at-last acquired truly scholarly student, Peter Quillan. It is on him that they fasten their hopes to put their preparatory school on the map intellectually, by his winning a scholarship to one of the great schools on the next rung in the English private educational ladder, Eton or Winchester or Harrow. The peculiar intimacy, even devotion, which develops between masters in schools like this and their wives on...